There was once a pub called the Mucky Pup, my favourite in London. I drank there, did quizzes there, DJ-ed there, danced there, ate vegetarian roasts there. The Mucky Pup is no more; it changed hands. In January 2020, it went under the name the Bill Murray, a comedy club. I was there to see the comedian Bethany Black perform a set to a small but packed house. The melancholy I felt at being on the site of so many memories, now restructured and repurposed beyond recognition, was quickly extinguished by her act. An experienced standup, she was engaging, easily confident; her accent, fast and fluent style and timing triggering associations ranging from Victoria Wood to Ken Dodd and Les Dawson, her tendency to digress reminiscent of Ronnie Corbett. Her set was traditional in other respects: predicaments, tricky situations, the comedy of embarrassment, rude bits, very British fare. As she casually disclosed, Black is trans, lesbian, autistic, as well as a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. All these multiple streams flowed into the river of her comedy. “The walk from the car to the venue is the scariest part of my day, this bit’s dead easy,” she said. Her act included the story of a man who refused to wipe his arse because he thought it was “gay” to do so, a nervous dialogue with her own brain wondering if she was a racist, a routine about finding a pillow in a hotel covered in spunk, and another that culminated in the line, “It’s going to look like you’ve been eaten out by Hitler,” the context of which I leave to your imagination. Discussing responses to her act, she said she was often complimented on being “politically incorrect”. But she demurred from that. She disdained, she said, comedians who complained that you “can’t joke about anything any more”: what they mean is: “People have stopped laughing at my boring, tired old fucking stereotypes.” She outlined her own guiding dictum as a standup: “Make sure the jokes you’re doing aren’t adding to the horrible shittiness of the world. People confuse the subject and the object of a joke. The subject can be anything as long as the object of your joke isn’t using your power to make someone else feel shittier.” Despite its audacity, its scatology, Black’s finely calibrated comedy never failed to abide by that dictum. More than that, however, Bethany Black made us laugh out loud, caused our jaws to drop into our laps that afternoon, largely because of the combination of her gifts as a comedian and her personal traits, which enabled her to “see the world in ways which none of you will ever see”. The Conservatives have been in power since 2010. They have visited upon us austerity, inequality, Brexit, corruption, an almost wilful incompetence, lethal xenophobia and migrant-bashing, and a “culture war”, largely provoked by themselves, cynically feeding on their supporters’ sense of self-pity – an extended exercise in gaslighting in which perpetrators claim to be victims. Satire has found itself struggling in the face of grotesques such as Boris Johnson and Priti Patel – a reboot of Spitting Image failed spectacularly because if anything it made the trolls by whom we had the misfortune to be governed seem less beyond the pale than they actually were. Despite all that, or perhaps in the face of it, British comedy at its best has become a haven of considerateness, diversity, multiculturalism, richer in its comedic detail and observation and truth to reality than ever before. Certain notions of what comedy should be, while still prevalent, are increasingly discredited. Take the idea that comedy should be “edgy”, a belief persisted in by, among others, Ricky Gervais. This seemingly sharp, rebel imperative has been exposed by, among others, the standup comic James Acaster, as a libertarian pretext for punching down. It was as if to counter the pain and division, at times seemingly deliberate political callousness and strife, that comedy made its dialectical shift from cruelty to kindness as the 00s gave way to the 2010s. At its best it has become not merely banally escapist but a genuine and humane haven. It is a world away from our broken world, and yet British comedy has never been in a better moral state. It has been strengthened by its inclusivity, its diversity, its neurodiversity, all the embedded values of political correctness. It is no longer merely the stories of angry or frustrated white men, though white men are certainly given a more than fair representation in the modern British comic firmament. And it’s this concern for inclusion, as embodied in the work of a Bethany Black, that gives rise to the kindness I allude to: a determination never to punch down, a rule to which even Frankie Boyle solemnly abided in 2020, despite his form earlier in his career. Yes, there remain problems – the sort of blankly, generically ambitious comedians lambasted by Stewart Lee, the domination of satire by chortling Oxbridge types who seem inured to the human misery caused by the politicians whose ribs they dig. There is also the question, as across the board in culture and entertainment, of the avenues sealed off to an increasingly culturally disfranchised working class, denied the opportunities and entry points they enjoyed 40 years ago in more egalitarian times. Such is the fragmentation of modern TV that it is less easy for new comedians, not just because of their multitudes, to become household names à la Del Boy. Still, comedies such as This Country, People Just Do Nothing and Detectorists, all in their own way derived from The Office, strike grace notes of consideration, nuance, a baked-in reflectiveness of the tradition to which they belong and from which they gently depart. Characters such as metal detecting club members Andy and Lance in Detectorists would, just a few years earlier, have most likely been treated as caricatures, losers, English grotesques worthy only of mockery. Freed from the hegemony of the laugh track, series such as Detectorists were able to leaven their comedy with other elements above and beyond the traditional resorts of melodrama or huggy US-style sentimentalism. There’s a sort of existential correctness about Andy (Mackenzie Crook, who wrote the series) and Lance (Toby Jones). They are at peace with themselves, a calm that exudes from the flat screen. It was a care that extended beyond the characters to the audience, as if the actors were conscious of a need not just to raise laughs but also to take on the obligation of maintaining the wellbeing and mental health of those watching. A similar kindness pervades Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, which again represents a shift. It was clearly inspired by Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon’s The Trip, in which the comedians played fictionalised versions of themselves undertaking a restaurant tour of the UK for the Observer. The comedy mostly saw them trying to outdo each other’s impressions, with Coogan in particular eager to put down his perceived rival Brydon at every opportunity. Theirs was a curious bond of friendship, cemented as much by mutual resentment as admiration. There is no cruelty in Gone Fishing, not even to the fish they catch, which are quickly released back into the water. As well as the ravishing, verdant consolation of the British countryside in which the pair angle, there is a sense of the mutual care between Whitehouse and Mortimer, their non-fictionalised selves, two national treasures treasured indeed as they goad each other affectionately but also share stories of health scares; these are yesterday’s young bucks, whom a TV nation has watched grow into middle age. Toby Jones, Mackenzie Crook, Bob Mortimer, Paul Whitehouse: abiding evidence that despite suspicions to the contrary, white men can be funny. Comedy has never been an agent for radical change and there are no laughs in idealism. The triumph of what is pejoratively referred to as “wokeness” in British comedy hasn’t been that sort of “triumph”. Rather, it has brought in an unprecedented measure of truth and inclusivity, and a developed, evolved sense of what it is to be us, you, them – all of us. British comedy is en route to becoming, by virtue of not playing it safe, a safe space for all.